Mr Scott Paton is the head chef at Àclèaf restaurant in Boringdon Hall, a five-star hotel and spa in Devon with a history that stretches back to the days of the Domesday Book. Since he started the job in 2016, Mr Paton, who was born near Exeter and has always lived and worked in the area, has been delving into that history, the end result being an eight-course historical tasting menu, which features dishes – from an 11th-century brawn to a cured halibut dish inspired by a banquet with Sir Francis Drake – that draw from Boringdon Hall’s past. This spring, he’s launching this special experience alongside the newly revamped restaurant Àclèaf (Anglo-Saxon for “oak leaf”), in which diners and guests can choose a convivial four-course menu or a six-course tasting experience, both of which focus on potent, yet simple, quality British ingredients. Below, he explains how the ingredients of the southwest have informed his flavour-packed dishes.

Inspiration can come from many places and people, but the root of all my cooking is the ingredients. The southwest has this abundance of incredible produce, and it’s probably something I’ve always taken for granted, particularly early in my career. It’s only in the past five, six years that I’ve begun to think, oh, wait a minute. Why is this three-star chef in London using the same duck that I use and have been using since I was 16? I’ve always thought this was amazing duck. But now I’m starting to realise that, although it’s amazing to me, it’s also amazing to the best chefs in the world. Over the course of my career, developing an appreciation for the produce has transformed my cooking style. When you have that appreciation, you can almost relax a little bit. Trust that it’s good. If it’s a seriously quality ingredient, I don’t need to do much to it at all.

At Àclèaf, in particular, the whole ethos, in terms of menu writing, has been about finding the best produce that’s around. So if you come to our restaurant, we don’t want you to have crab that good anywhere else. We have so many people coming here who have our tasting menu and say, “I don’t really like crab, but I’ll give it a try.” And they come away from it going, “I’ve never had crab like that before. It was amazing.” You almost want to say to them, “That’s really lovely, but please don’t think you can go somewhere else and have crab like that.” To get the crab on the plate, it involves so much effort, not only from the chefs in the kitchen. It’s everything, from the fishermen all the way through. You can’t just pinpoint it to the crab. Everything on the menu is selected with that ethos in mind.

I didn’t set out to build a locavore menu. The suppliers are ones I’ve been working with now for 18 or 19 years. And it just so happens that most of them are from the area I grew up, near Exeter. The duck supplier, for example, is still in Exeter, or the outskirts of Exeter. The lamb comes from the village I grew up in. A lot of the suppliers we use now also go to London and serve the top chefs, so we’re lucky to have them on our doorstep. These guys in London, they won’t have access to the fresh deliveries that we have. If they get a delivery, it’s probably going to be mid-afternoon or late evening for the next day, whereas for us, it comes in for 11 o’clock in the morning.

The food at our historical dinner is a bit theatrical. I want it to stick in people’s minds. On a day-to-day basis at Àclèaf, it just has to be pleasing to look at. Presentation isn’t something we try particularly to impress with. We try and let the ingredients sit where they need to. I often compose dishes in a circle. What I most like about that is that it keeps it uniform and keeps it consistent and keeps the sauce contained. A lot of it is about how it eats as well. I don’t want it to be too fussy. I’ve had stages in my career where I’ve had 17 items on the plate, but now I’m quite happy for some things to look like there are only three, four, five ingredients in the dish, but everything to be there flavour-wise.

We have to work hard to get the produce for our dishes and sometimes pay through the nose to get it. But probably our oyster dish, which is spaghetti cooked in an oyster velouté with caviar and sea herbs, is the hardest because it’s so simple. The greatest challenge is making the most of these high-end ingredients and allowing them to speak for themselves.

_The Tasting Through The Ages dinner at Boringdon Hall is available on 3 April, 17 July and 18 September 2020 _